Edge of the Stream

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Before there was a Factory Hollow there was a Green on a hilltop and a meetinghouse, but even before those, to make a place habitable, settlers required a gristmill and a fulling mill and a sawmill, each along a nearby stream with a steady flow and a spot for a mill dam with a good fall and some hollows upstream dammed for the dry spell. 

Sprain Brook, along which Gideon Hollister, second of that name, settled, begins in the swampland below Davies Hollow, accumulates flow quickly near its head and follows a narrow valley for 6 to 8 miles south, where valleys merge out of the Northwest Hills. It was all engineered by the lumbering glaciers who, midway through the long valley, sent Sprain Brook through a meadow above which Gideon Hollister set a dam to channel Sprain Brook over the flutter wheel that kept his saw blade hopping 120 times per minute for 170 years. But Gideon Hollister was not the first to set his works in this spot. 

Where the valley widens to a meadow, beavers once dammed its flow and lived off the bounty of the stream, but there were no beavers when Hollister settled, thanks to those who didn’t settle but who traded the bounty of the beavers’ pelts with those who hunted and trapped them to the point of extinction, an event recorded in the diet of the native people and in a layer of sediment, many miles south under Long Island Sound. There, fifty years before Hollister settled, rich nutrients from the rotting debris of failing beaver colonies had made algae bloom and die. 

The same nutrients that made algae bloom in Long Island Sound made broad, flat meadows bloom in the fertile loam of vanished beaver works, near where Sprain Brook turned the Hollister mill wheel and up and down the valley in both directions and in the infinite hills beyond Sprain Brook.  

Such meadows brought settlers who could plant them quickly, but the settlers’ first crop was old-growth trees from the ageless forests which kept Gideon Hollister’s sawmill turning as long as Sprain Brook flowed and kept his potash works burning when it froze. Captain Hollister traded with his neighbors for their needs and his, and he fought beside them for their freedom.

When, in 1805, the turnpike followed the glacier through the long valley, the property with sawmill and water rights belonged to Gideon Hollister, third of that name, who probably appreciated the road's traffic of iron goods from the north and merchants from the south and an expanded region of neighbors and trade lubricated by reliable currency that flowed even to the colliers, smoking mounded timbers in the hills beyond the valley. 

And his son, fourth of that name, continued sawing lumber there for floorboards and headboards, cupboards and clapboards, posts, beams, shingles and shakes until he sold the mill in 1844 to 18-year-old Almon Galpin. Galpin restored it after Sprain Brook raged in the floods of 1853, taking out part of the dam and much of the valley. By then the endless forests were eighty percent gone, cut to the horizon, though Galpin would go on cutting through the Civil War until he sold the mill in 1876.

Edward Fenn was the next to own the flow of water, adding a forge and cabinet-making shop to the flutter of the mill and the chatter of the saw. It was said he could make anything out of wood, and he did so there for a half century until he retired, and the mill wheel stopped in 1926. 

Forests have returned around Sprain Brook and beyond, but the sheltering space beneath old growth canopy is gone forever and species of things we will never see, their passage marked where rich nutrients of the uprooted forest made algae bloom and die in the sediment under Long Island Sound as Sprain Brook sawed floorboards and barn boards, cradles and coffins that can still be found along the turnpike road.

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The mill was stabilized by Sidney and Beatrice Hessel and restored later by Jane Bentzen, Benedict Silverman and Steve Solley. 

Material for the above came from the following source:

“Why We Need Beavers” by Ben Goldfarb in “Connecticut Explored,” Spring, 2019

“An 18th Century Flutter Mill Reborn” by Frances Chamberlain, NYT Dec. 15, 1996

Stone By Stone, Robert M. Thorson, Walker & Co, NY, 2002

Empire Over The Dam, Kenneth T. Howell & Einar W. Carlson, Pequot Press, 1974

"An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites” Matthew Roth, Soc. for Industrial Archeology

A Walk Thru Faust's Garden

Next Slide-Talk:

April 1, 2019 (no kidding) at 7:00 PM

Work in Progress: On Photographing Brazen Grit

Granby Camera Club

meeting in the Granby Senior Center, Community Room

15 North Granby Road, Granby, CT

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: It wasn’t exactly magnetism that drew the iron blast furnaces to the ore. When the forests were gone in Northwestern CT, and one could look across the hillsides, the ground shifted and iron ore was attracted to coal. Iron made from coke had qualities industrial manufacturers wanted, while charcoal iron lingered for those who cherished quality wrought iron, a niche market. The forests of the Berkshire Hills had been burned; in the West there were mountains of Coke yet to plunder.

We’ve arrived at what might be considered ground zero of American industrial enterprise. In the three-ring-circus of the industrial revolution, the feature acts were always energy transportation, and iron. A firm grip on any one of the three was a firm grip on the throttle. The names click into position like the reels of a slot machine: Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and standing behind them, at the cashiers’ window, J..P. Morgan, the only one born to wealth. 

To travel from the 1847 Beckley Blast Furnace in East Canaan, CT, with its bucolic tombstone remains (recently posted), to wha’s left of Andrew Carnegie’s Carrie Furnaces, across the river from the infamous Homestead Works in PA, requires a half century leap. How many miles of rail had been laid? How many locomotives sent steaming over the tracks? And how many new steam ships were bringing newcomers, as the canal was being cut across the isthmus of Panama to reach Pacific waters from the Atlantic coast?  And how many tall structures scraped the sky, made first of iron and soon of steel in New York and Chicago, before the Great War came and we made more guns and tanks? And after the War we took to the roads in oily vehicles of iron and steel. 

Welcome to Faust’s Garden. Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and Morgan left huge legacies, both for good and for ill that we still can’t reckon. 

 

Ex Caliber

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Gallionella and Leptothrix live at the bottom of the bog where they make iron grow. Iron compounds dissolved upstream are freed downstream when washed with the peaty, acid-rich waters where this pond-bottom team of anaerobic bacteria live and consume and concentrate the iron particles into tubor-like buds. 

Medieval armorers relied on men with rods who poked across swampland to harvest the buds. A clever bog harvester preserved his resources by carefully replacing the peat and marking locations so a generation later his children might return and harvest his crop of iron tubors. 

And the magical arts of refining bog ore into workable metal belonged to genius alchemists, who knew the secrets of mixing the iron with charcoal and flux, of fanning the hot mix, feeding the furnace at the top so it bloomed at the bottom. 

There was bog iron enough for the armorers and blacksmiths, but the Faustian dreams of scientists and inventors required rock dug from hills.  And some rocks were barren while others bore ores. Rich veins of iron were discovered around 1730 near what was soon to be the town of Salisbury and then here in Canaan and elsewhere in the northwest hills of the colony called Connecticut. By the revolution a thriving iron industry flourished in the region and farmers and farm blacksmiths learned to make the tools needed to build and grow a nation.

Today the furnaces they built are unlikely tombstones along country roads in the frozen earth. They recall iron wills chained across the Hudson opposing English rule as they also represent axes and plowshares, hammers and nails. It was no picnic, making that iron. and a hungry furnace consumed forests for charcoal and branded circles on the forest floor still visible today, The forests have regrown, and this is no longer an industrial center nor even an especially busy picnic site.

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Below, charcoal kilns in Wassaic, NY, provided charcoal for local iron-making and a lime kiln in Sharon baked limestone to make lime used as flux. 

The King of Instruments, Notre Dame, Worcester — RIP

When the modes of the music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them. —Plato

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: According to Plato, there were two subjects essential to educate young people for their role in his Republic: music and gymnastic. Gymnastic prepared the body developing muscle and coordination, music prepared the soul by reaching deep inside us. By music, Plato meant also poetry; by extension music might include all artistic expression. As Pater reminds, “All art aspires to the condition of music.”

When Plato talks of the “basic laws of the state” changing, he is looking through the telescope from the opposite end than John Ruskin was (see previous blog post). Ruskin believed art  was the truest measure of a society; Plato would agree, but he was more interested in controlling than measuring. 

What do we learn about ourselves from the music and the art of our time?

Mirror, Mirror

"Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last.” 

—John Ruskin (1877)

Lascaux Nouveau

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: If “Style is the outer form of spirit,” as a good friend once told me, and if what is true of an individual’s “style” is also true of a community’s style, a nation’s style or the style of a whole civilization, then...

1. What art speaks for our own time, 2019 America?
2. What does it tell us about our spirit?  …about National character?

I invite anyone to suggest answers in the hope that art can get around partisan politics. What is the art that most represents who we are? What does it tell us about ourselves?
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NOTE: We are still seeking new audiences for our slide-talk and book signing for the 2019 season. We’ve done more than 80 of these in the last 3 years. The coming seasons will take us to Bethel, Granby and Fairfield, but if we haven’t been to your community, we still have dates available.  Help us out by passing word of our talk to places where we might be welcomed, or send us a contact name and we will follow through.

Lacuna Misterioso

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Sometimes the music lies in the notes and sometimes in the space between.

Auld Lang Syne

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: For those who can’t zoom, the actual music titles are, “Sleepers Awake” and “A Patriot’s Prayer.” Minor White suggests: “Photograph things not just for what they are, but for what else they are."

Casting Shop, Ansonia

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I kept expecting my eyes to adjust to the dark until I realized the dark adhered to every surface, hung in the air, soaked up light like a sponge. The president of the company was leading us on a tour into the darkness of the casting shop, while a foreman in a battered utility cart followed and worried from behind an oxygen mask attached by a hose to a tank in the back of his cart. That was spring, 2011.

The picture on the left was shot in June, 2013; in six months the company would be out of business. Work had already slowed. Then came the pickers and scrappers who contracted to salvage anything of value. They were followed by experts in white suits who detoxified whatever was left. The picture on the right was just taken this month, five years after work stopped. For several months workers have been gone, and the dark has been replaced by purposeless serenity.

Among the Thankful

Cadillac Mountain Sunrise

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: From Cape Breton in Canada to below the border with Mexico, Cadillac Mountain is the highest peak within 25 miles of the Atlantic ocean, and during certain seasons of the year it is the place in North America on which the first sunlight shines. Because there is a beautiful road winding to the top of Cadillac Mountain, on July 21 my grandson and I decided to drive there and photograph sunrise. We rose at 3:20 AM and were on the road by 3:40.

The road to the top of Cadillac Mountain is one of the most beautiful roads anywhere, also one of the most serpentine, with turns around sheer cliffs that can rearrange hairpins. In the pre-dawn dark it was not so beautiful, and each turn rounded dangerously toward darkness beyond our headlights. Morning fog didn’t help. I followed the tail lights of the car ahead of me until it turned off at a lookout, and then I was the lead car turning into dark. 

People traditionally go to mountaintops to reflect, and to gain the perspective, sometimes wisdom, that comes from standing apart and looking back. We had not expected to be alone, but we had not expected the extensive parking area almost as full as it had been at midday. After finding a place to park, we looked for a place to stand and watch and photograph. We could still see the lights of Bar Harbor against the night. All around were other seekers and photographers signalling to friends and scrambling to set a blanket or tripod on their piece of solitude.

Trolley Ride

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Culture: That shared amalgam of understandings, assumptions, institutions, events that bind people together — where does it come from? Trolleys once moved us; is it possible they also changed us? 

The first trolleys were horse trolleys. They barely moved faster than pedestrians on the sidewalk, and conversations were occasionally carried on between cab and curb. However, unlike stage coaches, trolleys followed tracks, maintained a schedule, and they provided space where people mixed and conversed publicly, often encouraged by the banter of the conductor. 

And even in the 1890’s when trolleys were electrified and horses were pastured, the motorman-conductor teams were known along their routes. They carried the news of the day, greeted their regulars by name, were a presence in each neighborhood assuring all’s well. The trolley’s whirring engine marked the city’s pulse, sang its lullaby.

Inter-city trolleys linked families, expanded horizons, tied cities into regions, made home bigger and mixed us up. 

When the trolley companies battled against the motormen and conductors, the riders often sided with the  faces they knew and trusted. Some children dreamed of becoming conductors, pillars of the community, beloved by all. Others dreamed of sitting up front, steering and controlling the engines that made the trolley stop and roll. Things often weren’t fair or friendly, but the civic space of the trolleys knitted neighborhoods and communities that made other things possible.

resources: 
Trolley Wars: Streetcar Workers on the Line by Scott Mollow
Post Roads and Iron Horses, by Richard DeLuca

Cape Cod Seascape

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: How much water must one have to make a seascape? One more from Cape Cod as I turn to work on recent images shot last week in Pittsburgh area industrial legacies.

Color or b/w?

Cape Cod September in Black & White

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Minor White famously advised, "One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.” It’s an idea I’ve found especially useful because photography usually leads me to places where my interest is in part on what it is or was, and I’m always aware that many who view my pictures are there for “what it is.” 

These coastal waters around Cape Cod are different. Here, place, time and history dissolve, subjects are accidental, and composition becomes everything. Photography becomes a kind of dance partnered with a fluid landscape.

Minor White later commented on his own formulation: "When you try to photograph something for what it is you have to go out of yourself, out of your way, to understand the object its facts and essence. When you photograph things for what 'Else' they are, the object goes out of its way to understand you.” - Minor White

Low Tide on Cape Cod

Photo Slide-Talk

Making Photographs of Vanishing Industry in Brass Valley

North Haven Camera Club

http://www.northhavencameraclub.com/meetings/

Oct. 2, 2018 at 7 PM

free, non-members are welcome

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I’m just back from a week of making photographs on Cape Cod in a workshop led by Tony Sweet. Tony is a disciple of Canadian legend, Freeman Patterson, and Tony's meticulously planned workshop reminded me of everything that so inspired me when I took a workshop with Freeman a dozen years ago. For both Tony and Freeman, photography is less about making the great photograph and more about the processes of shooting and making pictures and about the music of composition. Although my primary purpose in following Tony was to draw on his knowledge of good shooting sites, when the weather turned bland I recalled Freeman’s admonitions that good photographs can be made anywhere there is light, and Tony's approach to photography reminded me of my own photographic roots. Additionally, Tony was full of good tips related especially to software, processing and equipment. 

We met for shoots before sunrise and finished our day after the last glow of sunset began to fade. In three-and-a-half days we had seven shoots and visited ten good photo sites, and Tony’s partner, Susan provided a list of sites and coordinates so we could return later on our own. Recommended for all energetic photographers.

Journey — Extrusion Press

Photo Slide-Talk

Making Photographs of Vanishing Industry in Brass Valley

North Haven Camera Club

http://www.northhavencameraclub.com/meetings/

Oct. 2, 2018 at 7 PM

free, non-members are welcome

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The first time I entered the American Brass tube mill in Waterbury I was overwhelmed and puzzled by a place that shouldn’t have existed and machinery that I didn’t understand.

In my book, Brass Valley: "The Fall of an American Industry I tell of turning my camera toward the giant machine whining and smoking near the front of the shed. I later learned it was the extrusion press, the only one of its kind in the country and the reason men were still at work in this ancient tube mill. For three years men who ran ancient machines explained what they were doing and allowed us to photograph them at their work. 

By the time the factory closed in December 2013 I knew its purpose, its rhythms, and its songs. When it closed I learned the journey hadn't ended, and I continued making pictures like the one above, as other workers scrapped and salvaged and detoxified, and when I returned last month, the day after the adjoining lampworks was gutted by fire, and I made one last photograph. The tube mill looked like every other abandoned factory I've photographed, and it was impossible to know what once happened there or what was produced. 

Below is a newly processed photograph of Gil, Spike and Bob running the press in 2012. Further down is the photo taken last month, the day after the fire.